Orla decided to get out of the bath.
As her head broached the surface she saw a masked face leaning down over her. Leather gloves fastened around her throat and pushed her under the water. She lashed out, kicking and flailing and swallowing water as she tried to scream. As she felt the fight draining out of her body the masked man hauled her up out of the water and slapped her across the face, forcing her to breathe. She coughed up a lungful of water. Without a word he pushed her back under the water. She tried to grab his wrists and pull them away from her throat, but he was too strong. She splashed up water, kicking frantically. She slapped at the surface, spraying bubbles, then slipped down the length of the tub. Her head hit the bottom.
Orla opened her mouth to scream for help instinctively and choked again as her mouth filled with soapy water.
She slapped helplessly at the side of the tub, trying to reach something, anything.
The masked man hauled her up again. She coughed water, spluttering and trying to see through stinging eyes. She couldn’t focus on anything in the room. There was steam, and in the steam there were shadows, blurs. She could have been seeing three masked men or one.
“Were you really stupid enough to think you could hide from us anywhere in this city?” She didn’t recognize the voice. The accent was thick, heavy, but that could have been the water and the fear distorting what she heard.
She was helpless. She was naked. She reached up for the man’s face. She wanted to see him. Her fingers barely touched the wool of his balaclava before he grabbed her wrist and twisted, using his grip on her wrist to push her under the water again. As she went down she heard someone behind him say, “Don’t break her.”
She tried to push her head back above the water. She couldn’t. The masked man reached down, his hand closing around her throat, and kept her under.
“The boss wants the bitch alive.”
She knew that voice.
She knew it because she’d been listening to it all day.
She knew it because she had been stupid enough to trust it.
Uzzi Sokol.
The toad’s man.
19
Sir Charles Wyndham made the call at close to midnight. The ring signal was broken on the third cycle. A sleepy voice demanded, “This better be good.”
“If the bald man has a chain through his tongue, how can he sing?” Sir Charles said, careful to enunciate every syllable clearly. It was a stupid opening gambit. Anyone monitoring the line would be immediately curious.
“Say that again,” the man on the other end of the line said. The old man could almost hear the sleep slipping from his effeminate voice.
“If the bald man has a chain through his tongue, how can he sing?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, do you have any idea what time it is?”
Sir Charles had no sympathy for the man. He had become safe, comfortable in his life. Like so many others in the upper echelons of the trade he’d come to think that the nine-to-five daily grind was his right. Late night calls, safe words and clandestine meets were for the grunts doing the leg work.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“We are talking.”
“The line isn’t secure. Meet me at Fagus sylvatica. First light. There are things we need to discuss that can only be said face to face.”
He hung up before the other man could object.
Max, the old man’s butler, pushed his chair through the soft wood chippings of the bridal path known locally as Rotten Row. The name was more colorful than the reality of the path. The birds were up, the dawn chorus breaking out all over the city of London. The neatly trimmed grass of Hyde Park still glistened with diamonds of dew. The air was crisp and clean. It was one of the few hours of the day when London didn’t feel like it was suffocating under the smog of pollution.
A little way ahead riders from the Household Cavalry were giving their mounts a run out. The drum of horse’s hooves shivered through the ground beneath them. Sir Charles felt it through the steel frame of his wheelchair. He had a blanket folded over his lap and a newspaper folded over the blanket. A few early morning joggers crisscrossed the path-Brownian Random Motion made flesh. A woman with a short-clipped, black bob walked beside them for a hundred yards, a miniature black poodle skipping along beside her. It always struck the old man as amusing how a certain type of dog owner seemed to subconsciously model themselves on their pets. It was almost as though they were breeding little versions of themselves. Two legs good, four legs bad, he thought to himself wryly as he watched the seductive sway of her hips as she moved away.
Sir Charles liked the park in the morning. It teamed with all sorts of life, not just joggers or birds, flying squirrels and red foxes. It was a microcosm of the city itself. In the distance he saw a tall man in a pin-striped suit and bowler hat walk through what had once been the Tyburn Gate down by Speakers Corner. Even from this distance he was instantly recognizable. He walked with what could only be described as an old school, jaunty bounce to his stride. He looked preposterous as he twirled the silver-tipped cane he held in his right hand. Even from where he sat, Sir Charles could hear the faintest strains of his whistling. All the old man could think as he watched this caricature of British gentry stroll through the park was how on earth had Quentin Carruthers ever survived out in the field. Of course when he was a younger man he had been quite the dapper bon vivant, a dandy, happy to work, rest and play hard with the boys. The boys back then had included Kim Philby, Burgess and McClean. The Cambridge crew. It still fascinated the old man that Quentin had managed to come out of that fiasco clean while all those around him were busy losing their heads or defecting. For all his affected effeminacy, the old queen had always had a well-honed sense of self-preservation. Somehow though, as the ’60s became the ’70s and the ’70s the ’80s, he had become a parody of himself. In the new millennium he was nothing short of a relic.
The man cut toward the bench beside the old upside-down tree, Fagus sylvatica ‘Pendula,’ and sat himself down. He opened his case and took grease-proof-paper-wrapped triangles of tuna sandwiches out. He didn’t eat them. He used them to feed the birds while he waited for the old man to join him. It was their familiar meeting point. It had been six months since Sir Charles had last visited the old tree. Fagus was really quite something, a weeping beech. It looked like children had gathered a huge stack of fallen branches and built a cave out of them. He liked to think that only a few yards away the wretched villainy of old London had hung by their necks while the crows fed on them, and it amused him that the new city was so eager to hide from the old that it renamed Tyburn Marble Arch. It was probably one of the earliest examples of spin doctoring he had ever come across. It seemed a fitting place for two old spies to sit and share the early morning.
Maxwell pushed the old man’s wheelchair alongside the bench and made his excuses to leave him alone for a few minutes. Sir Charles took the folded broadsheet from his lap and made an elaborate show of opening it up and turning to the financial pages. Time had not been kind to the man sitting beside him.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Charles, dear boy. Do we need to go through this charade every time? It’s all well and good to play at being spies when you are seventeen, but when you are pushing the wrong side of seventy, well it is getting to be something of a chore, I must confess. The fun has quite gone out of the game.”
“You always were a spoilsport, weren’t you, old boy?” Sir Charles smiled.
“If by that you mean I was one for propriety, I think you must have me mistaken for someone much more interesting. Well, I assume you have a terribly good reason for dragging me out here?”
“Grace Weller. One of yours?” the old man said without any preamble. He folded the top of the newspaper over so the masthead disappeared.